Fort Wilkins Historic State Park

In the early 1840s, word spread that the Keweenaw Peninsula held rich veins of native copper, and prospectors and miners rushed to this remote shore of Lake Superior, one of the earliest mineral rushes in the nation's history. Fearing conflict among the newcomers and with the region's Native people, the U.S. Army built Fort Wilkins in 1844 to keep the peace.

The feared troubles never really materialized, and the fort was garrisoned only briefly before being abandoned, then reoccupied for a short time after the Civil War. Because it saw so little hard use and was built at the very end of the road, much of it survived, giving later generations a rare intact example of a mid-nineteenth-century army post.

The park has restored the fort's wooden barracks, officers' quarters, kitchens, workshops, and storehouses, many furnished as they would have been when soldiers lived here. In summer, costumed interpreters take on the roles of soldiers, laundresses, and other members of the garrison, demonstrating the daily routines, drills, and chores of frontier army life.

Wandering the parade ground and stepping into the low log buildings, you get a strong sense of how isolated and demanding this posting was, a handful of soldiers stationed at the far edge of the country, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, through long and brutal winters. It is one of the most complete pictures of the era anywhere in the Midwest.

The fort sits on a narrow neck of land between Lake Superior and Lake Fanny Hooe, near Copper Harbor, the tiny village where US-41 comes to its northern end. The setting is spectacular, with the great cold lake on one side and forested hills all around, and the park offers camping, trails, and a beach.

Nearby stands the Copper Harbor lighthouse, reachable by boat, and the winding drive up Brockway Mountain delivers one of the finest views in the Upper Peninsula, out over the peninsula, the harbor, and the endless blue of Lake Superior. This is the wild, scenic, end-of-the-road country that draws travelers to the top of the Keweenaw.

The copper the miners rushed to find had already been worked here for thousands of years. The Keweenaw is Anishinaabe homeland, the country of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), whose descendants are enrolled today in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. Their ancestors, and Indigenous peoples before them, mined the peninsula's native copper for millennia, trading it across much of the continent.

The nineteenth-century copper boom that Fort Wilkins was built to oversee eventually made the Keweenaw one of the great mining districts in the world, drawing immigrants from across Europe and leaving a legacy of mining towns, headframes, and history now protected in part as a national historical park. The fort is one chapter in that long human story of copper on Lake Superior.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.